Smash-Mouth Criticism

By John Leonard

Published: July 18, 2004

HATCHET JOBS

Writings on Contemporary Fiction.

By Dale Peck.

228 pp. The New Press. $23.95.

ALTHOUGH Robert Southey was the poet laureate of England from 1813 until his death in 1843, and a Lake District buddy of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he is hardly read at all today. A wisecrack by Richard Porson may have done some serious damage. About Southey's epic poems, Porson said, ''They will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but -- not till then.''

You will notice that I mosey. Some of us, when we are about to be unpleasant, are bothered by the feeling that it's almost as hard to write a bad book as a good one and lots easier to write a slash-and-burn review. So we walk around the block to suck up Randall Jarrell and perspective. Others, like Dale Peck, fall down out of the sky on the head of the pedestrian author like a piano or a safe. Peck is his own blunt instrument.

Which is why, in ''Hatchet Jobs,'' his Newgate Calendar of maledictions, he leans on words with primary colors, like terrible, bloated, boring and gratuitous; hate, resent, stale and slather; maudlin, dreck, drivel and insipid; muddled, pretentious, derivative and bathetic -- not to mention scatologies that can't be reprinted here but brought no blush to the bum of The New Republic, where most of Peck's fatwas first appeared and where most of American literature is generally considered a waste of the editors' warped space and deep time.

Peck is so hard on his elders that you suspect him of symbolic patricide, except that he is just as hard on his peers. Famously, of course, Rick Moody: ''the worst writer of his generation.'' But Colson Whitehead gets it for his ''stiff, schematic'' first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' and a second, ''John Henry Days,'' with ''the doughy center of a half-baked cake.'' David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest'' so much fails to amuse him that he wishes on Wallace an anal assault. Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and the Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem, are rudely dismissed for lack of ''a true empathetic undercurrent'' and what he elsewhere disdains as ''pomo shenanigans.'' Nor is he impressed by the Dirty Realists (trailer homes), the Brat Packers (nightclubs) or the New Narrativists (sexual transgression).

But the wise old heads are also on his chopping block. So Nabokov, between ''Lolita'' and ''Pale Fire,'' sold out to ''sterile inventions.'' At the bottom of its bowl of ''watery oatmeal,'' the subtext of ''American Pastoral'' is Philip Roth's misogyny. Thomas Pynchon in ''a 30-year writing career hasn't produced a single memorable or even recognizably human character.'' Julian Barnes ''crawls under your skin and itches like scabies.'' Stanley Crouch's ''Don't the Moon Look Lonesome'' is such ''a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad faith,'' that it's amazing the guy shows up on Charlie Rose. The ''ridiculous dithering'' of John Barth, John Hawkes and William Gaddis isn't even worth discussing, but they belong to ''a bankrupt tradition'' going back to James Joyce and ''the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses,' '' which tradition has now broken down ''like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of Don DeLillo.''

This isn't criticism. It isn't even performance art. It's thuggee. However entertaining in small doses -- we are none of us immune to malice, envy, schadenfreude, a prurient snuffle and a sucker punch -- as a steady diet it's worse for readers, writers and reviewers than self-abuse; it causes the kind of tone-deaf, colorblind, nerve-damaged and gum-sore literary journalism that screams ''Look at me!'' The rain comes down -- and the worms come out -- and just what the culture doesn't need is one more hall monitor, bounty hunter or East German border guard.

Not that Peck hates everyone. There's Homer, E. M. Forster, Thomas Bernhard, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. But except for Vonnegut, all they get in his fleet passing are adjectives that glow like gumdrops in the dark. He would much rather seethe and twitch: ''If you aren't a novelist,'' he hair-shirts, ''I'm not sure you can imagine what it feels like to write such heresy. Though I normally write in the morning, I am writing this in the middle of the night like a fugitive; my hands are literally shaking as I type.''

Is he really that afraid of Heidi Julavits? The hit man is projecting. So Western literary culture went off the tracks with J. Joyce, smashed up entirely with D. DeLillo and deserves wholesale junk-heaping, from the modernists who merely twinkle-toed in the theater of war, one blood war after another, to the post-toasties who can't even tell anymore if they're being ironic. In place of the word games, Peck would bring back ''something ineffable, alchemical, mystical: the potent cocktail of writer and reader and language, of intention and interpretation, conscious and unconscious, text, subtext and context, narrative, character, metaphor'' -- novels ''illustrating the tension between society and the self,'' written by the old-fashioned sort of Author-God who ''feels guilty about causing his characters to suffer so much and offers them apologies in the form of epiphanies or the satisfaction of inhabiting a meaningful narrative.''